British citizens Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, better known as the ‘Tipton Three’, were kidnapped by Northern Alliance fighters while on a short visit to Afghanistan after 9/11. They were handed over to US forces, eventually finding their way to Guantánamo via a detention camp at Kandahar airbase. The men were beaten, abused, shackled, isolated and accused of being jihadis, who had gone to Afghanistan to fight. An SAS officer claimed they were funded by the radical British Islamist group, Al Muhajiroun.

During their captivity, they were told that video footage had emerged of them meeting Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in Afghanistan in 2000. That claim proved as outrageous as some of the questions put to them (‘If I wanted to get hold of surface-to-air missiles in Tipton, where would I go?’) and could easily have been refuted. It was eventually established that Rhuhel was actually studying in England at the time and working at Currys. Asif had been in trouble with the law, and investigators could have sought an alibi from the British police to clear his name.

The ‘Tipton Three’ case, recently dramatised in Michael Winterbottom’s film, The Road to Guantánamo, is one of many documented in Fabricating Terrorism: British complicity in rendition and torture. The dossier, released this month by the human rights organisation, Cageprisoners, draws on interviews with detainees, legal opinion and evidence collected by activists, to prove that the use of rendition and torture in the ‘war on terror’ is not simply the preserve of the CIA.

‘No State Party shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.’

Article 3 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT). Britain and the USA are both signatories.

It shows that British officers and diplomats have supplied ‘intelligence’ about British citizens and residents, and turned a blind eye to the ‘coercive interrogation’ techniques practiced on them by the US and its client governments. There is also evidence that British agents have themselves been involved in interrogations at ‘black sites’ and prisons in central Asia, north Africa and the Middle East.

Rendition is the process of illegally moving detainees between these sites, transporting them from one jurisdiction to another without any due process. Human Rights Watch has likened this to a form of extrajudicial kidnapping or ‘disappearing’, because it often involves sending suspects to countries that are known to practice torture. Yet the US government currently defends rendition, with secretary of state Condoleeza Rice claiming that ‘renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives’. (Rice, who grew up in the US south, might like to reflect upon the fact that rendition’s murky history can be traced back to the period before the American civil war, when southern states invoked the principle of ‘rendition’ to demand the return of runaway slaves who had escaped to the states of the ‘free’ north.)

The British government, in contrast, has remained in a state of constant denial. When challenged on the issue last December, Jack Straw laid out the official line: ‘Whether any particular “rendition” is lawful depends on the facts of each individual case … We would not assist in any case if to do so would put us in breach of UK law or our international obligations. In particular, we would not facilitate the transfer of an individual from or through the UK to another state where there were grounds to believe that the person would face a real risk of torture.’ Tony Blair has also emphasised the importance of upholding the rule of law in rendition cases, stating that, ‘If it is something that is unlawful I totally disapprove of it; if it is lawful, I don’t disapprove of it.’

For a lawyer, Blair’s grasp of international law is alarmingly wrongheaded. ‘Rendition’ and so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ are illegal and not permitted under any circumstance, even if no torture takes place. The only legal means to remove an individual from one state to another is extradition, a formal judicial process for transferring suspects between countries to face prosecution or, if already convicted, to serve a sentence.

The grave implications of rendition have been spelt out by EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini, who recently warned a special committee of the European Parliament: ‘Any EU nation that assisted the CIA with abductions, renditions and secret incarcerations could lose its EU voting rights.’

But such threats have not prevented the spread of rendition since 9/11. Asim Qureshi, a spokesperson for Cageprisoners, suggests that: ‘Illegal detentions have spread across the world like a malignant virus. Many states are guilty of complicity in these renditions and of outsourcing torture.’ Suspects have been transported to Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Uzbekistan and Romania – where they face a serious risk of maltreatment. Amnesty – and, indeed, the US State Department itself – has recorded a long list of human rights abuses in these countries. They are also some of the locations for the CIA’s new extra-judicial ‘black sites’ (unofficial detention centres), where it practises what it euphemistically calls ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – a polite way to say torture.

Evidence collected by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, plane spotters and even disillusioned former intelligence officers show that Britain is complicit in this rendition process. To start with, there is considerable evidence that rendition flights have passed through British airspace. Official denials from Jack Straw and Tony Blair were followed by the admission, made by armed forces minister Adam Ingram in a letter to Menzies Campbell, that two planes known to be used for rendition flights had landed at RAF bases. This information was only provided after Campbell and others had threatened to refer the matter to the parliamentary ombudsman.

Yet evidence gathered by Amnesty and other human rights campaigners shows that between 2001 and 2005 rendition flights occurred on a much larger scale than Ingram was prepared to admit, and that commercial airports as well as RAF ones were used. In total, Amnesty recorded at least 78 stopovers by rendition flights at four British airports – Luton, Glasgow, Prestwick and Northolt – for planes whose final destinations included Baku, Dubai, Cyprus, Karachi, Qatar, Riyadh, Tashkent and Warsaw. A recent Guardian investigation discovered 210 suspicious CIA flights crossing England alone.

In one notable example, a CIA-operated Gulfstream V jet, dubbed the ‘Guantánamo Bay Express’ by Amnesty, made several trips between Cairo and Prestwick in December 2001. That month, the same plane had arrived in Glasgow from Uzbekistan. Although it is impossible to document the precise fate of its passengers, Craig Murray, who was British ambassador there at the time, reported that Uzbek security forces had conducted torture, including the immersion of suspects’ body parts in boiling water, to gain intelligence for use by US and UK security agents. Murray was subsequently recalled from his post after he refused to remain silent about such practices.

British complicity in rendition runs deeper than just the use of its airspace, however. Cageprisoners reports that government employees have also been responsible for the unnecessary incarceration and rendition of British ‘suspects’, abrogating their obligations towards these detainees. The ‘Tipton Three’ claim that British diplomats tried to elicit fantasy confessions from them in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Another ex-Guantánamo detainee, Moazzam Begg, refers to an occasion when ‘the person from the Foreign Office turned up at the same meeting as the representative from MI5’ – a situation which he sees as illustrative of the complicity between the two organisations.

In the case of Jamil El Banna and Bishir Al Rawi, British intelligence agents were more directly responsible for rendition by passing dubious ‘information’ to counterpart agencies. The pair had decided to set up a peanut factory in Gambia in November 2002 and, although they had previously drawn the attention of MI5, they were given permission to travel. But Jamil and Bishir were immediately picked up when they landed in Gambia. Jamil reports being told by the Gambian agents that ‘it was the British who have told us to arrest you.’ The two men were later rendered to Kabul, where they were assaulted in the city’s ‘dark prison’ (a local nickname) before being transferred to Bagram airbase, also in Afghanistan, in January 2003. Their illegal rendition to Afghanistan and a subsequent rendering to Guantánamo was a direct result of incrimination by British intelligence, although to date neither man has been charged with any crime. Jamil reports that a US official told him: ‘It is your government, Britain … who called the CIA and told them that you and Bisher were in Gambia and to come and get you. Britain gave everything to us. Britain sold you out to the CIA.’
Bisher’s MP, Edward Davey, backs up this account: ‘In Gambia the group was interviewed by American officials. They had a file on Bisher, which must have come from the UK authorities … It had information on Bisher’s hobbies that he pursued in the UK.’ The case is one of several in which British intelligence has requested foreign secret services to pick up suspects on the basis of similarly flimsy evidence.

The British secret services were also involved in the case of Binyam Mohammed Al Habashi, an Ethiopian granted asylum in the UK. He has long maintained that British intelligence was directly involved in the interviews that led to his rendition. Jack Straw had previously denied this, but was forced to admit before the Commons foreign affairs committee last December that MI6 officers had, in fact, interrogated Al Habashi in Pakistan.

British dual citizen Martin Mubanga has also claimed that information provided by British intelligence led to his rendition to Guantánamo. But once it became clear that there was no evicence of his being an Al-Qaeda operative, Martin reports that the security services then tried to recruit him as a plant within Muslim communities in South Africa or Leeds. ‘They wanted me to go where no one would know me, I suppose so I could be undercover,’ he said.

As yet, there is no evidence that British intelligence officials have been directly involved in torturing suspects. But it would be premature to rule out that prospect completely. There is strong historical evidence that the British security forces used torture techniques in Northern Ireland, although official reports into the matter were something of a whitewash. More recently, the mass kidnapping of 28 Pakistanis in Greece last July for alleged links to the 7/7 London bombings caused an international scandal. In that case, it was claimed that at least one intelligence agent, linked to the British embassy, had been present when the men were physically tortured.

It is unclear whether or not this is an isolated incident. But what is clear is that interrogation is being outsourced to countries that engage in torture, and that British intelligence has been a willing informant for agencies that engage in rendition – shedding a very dark cloud over British government claims to stand at the forefront of the fight against torture.

When the UK became a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) on 10 December 2003, Jack Straw claimed that it would ‘promote a more intensive and concerted approach to eradicate torture through a preventive system of regular, independent visits to places of detention.’ Yet the presence of British agents at extra-judicial detention centres such as Guantánamo, the opening of British airspace to rendition flights, and the exchange of information with secret services that engage in ‘coercive interrogation’, all suggest that it is only torture itself that has become more intensive and concerted.The Cageprisoners dossier, Fabricating Terrorism: British complicity in rendition and torture, can be downloaded from www.cageprisoners.com

In this sense, the riots are merely a fresh wave of the violence that has become commonplace in suburban France over the past two decades. Led mainly by young French citizens born into first and second generation immigrant communities from the country’s former colonies in North Africa, these cycles are almost always sparked by the deaths of young black men at the hands of the police (whether through direct or indirect involvement), and then inflamed by the scornful response by the government.

The familiar pattern is now being repeated. Contrary to the first public statements of French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the two French teenagers of Malian and Tunisian backgrounds who died on 27 October had not been fleeing the scene of a burglary. They were instead part of a larger group of youths who had just finished playing football and were trying to avoid the now constant police identity checks targeted on black teenagers as they rushed home to break the Ramadan fast. ‘We didn’t want to spend an hour at the police station,’ explained one 16 year old who was with the teenagers killed. ‘If you don’t have your ID papers they’ll pick you up and won’t listen to any excuses.’ Tragically, the electrical relay substation in which the teenagers took refuge from the police ended up taking their lives.

Four days after the deaths, and just as community leaders were beginning to calm the situation, the security forces reignited the fire by emptying tear gas canisters inside a local Mosque where hundreds of worshippers had gathered for the ‘night of Destiny’ – a particularly holy night of Ramadan. The official reason for the police action: a badly parked car in front of the Mosque. Having first denied the incident took place, the government then implicitly admitted it, but refused to take any responsibility and still refuses to apologise to the Muslim community. This cued an escalation in rioting.

But the growing spread of civil unrest to other poor suburbs across France – Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Rennes, Nantes and other cities – is unprecedented. For Laurent Levy, a founding member of the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, a network which campaigns against the ‘oppression and discrimination produced by the post-colonial [French] Republic’, the explosion is no surprise. ‘When large sections of the population are denied any kind of respect, the right to work, the right to decent accommodation, and often the right to even access clubs and cafés, then what is surprising is not that the cars are burning but that there are so few uprisings of this nature,’ he argues.

Police racism and impunity are major factors. A 2004 report from the National Commission of Security Deontology revealed a massive 38 per cent increase in police violence in France, a third of which had a racist motive. In April 2005, an Amnesty International report criticised the ‘generalised impunity’ with which France’s police force operates, specifically in response to the violent treatment of young men from African backgrounds during identity controls.

But the level and intensity of the riots stems ultimately from the openly provocative public behaviour of French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, who is renowned for routinely dismissing the inhabitants of les banlieues as ‘yobs’, ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘riff-raff’. His response to the troubles has been to step up this rhetoric, calling rioters ‘vermin’ (racailles) and blaming ‘agents provocateurs’ for manipulating the suburban ‘scum’. His statement that the suburbs need ‘to be cleaned out with Karsher’ (a brand of industrial cleaner used to clean the mud off tractors) has poured oil onto the fire.

Sarkozy’s political one-upmanship on law and order is a deliberate strategy designed to flatter the French far right electorate. It should be viewed in the context of his fierce rivalry with French prime minister, Dominique De Villepin, for the 2007 Presidency. In reality, little separates the two men politically but the fight for the Elysée seems to have left them fiddling and jostling for position whilst Paris burned.

There is no easy answer as to how France can escape this political race to the bottom. In the short term, the government must cease speaking about the suburbs as dens of ‘scum’ that need to be ‘cleansed’. Sarkozy’s lies about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two boys, and his provocative deployment of a massively disproportionate police presence in the first days of the riots, have shown once again that he is unfit for public office. But the riots are ultimately not about two deaths or government arrogance. The underlying causes are decades of racist segregation, impoverishment, police brutality and disrespect, all now melding together into a fatal poison.

Incredibly, a simple gesture of regret could go a long way towards defusing the immediate tensions. At a press conference organised the morning after the gassing of the mosque, a young Muslim girl summed up a widespread feeling: ‘We just want them to stop lying, to admit that they’ve done it and to apologise. That’s the only thing that we are asking them to do’. It might not seem much, but in today’s France it would require a deep political and ideological transformation with nothing short of the recognition of these eternal ‘immigrants’ as full and equal citizens of the Republic.

An edited version of this article was first published in The Guardian on 8 October 2005

Gilles Kepel, one the French government’s favourite experts on Islam, recently described the UK’s strategy as a Faustian pact ‘whereby political asylum was given to radical Islamist ideologists in return for keeping Britain safe from violence’. Underpinning this perspective is a crude binary opposition between enlightened western democracies and the evil Islamist barbarians who take refuge within them, before exploiting their hosts as launch pads for Jihad.

The Juppé government’s response to the 1995 attacks was wide-ranging and brutal. It re-launched Vigipirate, a counter-terror offensive, mobilising 32,000 soldiers, riot police and intelligence services to control and monitor the population, in particular the deprived suburbs which were literally under siege. French police carried out violent and humiliating (yet almost always fruitless) raids on families and the neighbourhoods of suspects amid a public witch-hunt against Islamist networks. Uncorroborated police reports have sufficed for a long time in France to deport radial preachers to a country where they could face torture or ill treatment.

In the aftermath of the July attacks, commentators like Kepel were quick to argue that France’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy and campaign of so-called integration in the name of Republican values, embodied in the 2004 ban on the display of all religious symbols in schools, has spared the country terror attacks for a decade while Britain’s failure to follow Spain and Germany in adopting the French model has proved a spectacular own goal. However, as Tony Blair made clear in unveiling his government’s proposed legislation on 5 August, ‘the rules of the game have changed’. Suddenly, the French recipe for dealing with Islamic terror has been fêted by British politicians and media alike as the model to adopt in the war against domestic Islamic terror. It is no coincidence then that Blair’s August announcement set out almost identical measures to those introduced by France following the 1995 attacks.

But how would we regard the virtue of following the French model if, more than a decade after the first bombs ripped through the Paris Metro, enough conclusive evidence had been gathered to prove that the attacks carried out by Islamic militants were not fuelled by Islamic fundamentalism but were instead dreamt up and overseen by the Algerian secret service as part of a domestic political struggle that spilled over into Algeria’s former colonial master? The most comprehensive studies, including Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire’s Françalgérie: States’ Crimes and Lies, the product of six years of research, including testimonies from former French government advisers and a number of ex-Algerian secret service agents turned whistleblowers, show that this is exactly what happened.

In 1991, Algeria’s main Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won a comprehensive first round victory in the country’s inaugural multiparty general elections. This threatened to strip away the power of Algeria’s military generals, who had long controlled the North African state from the shadows.

Exploiting Europe’s fear of an Islamic government running Algeria, and the uncomfortably close relationship between the Algerian and French political establishments, the Algerian army intervened in the elections, halting the second round of voting by privately forcing the president Chadli Bendjedid to step down. A temporary Commission was formed to rule the country in the ensuing ‘crisis’. Not only did the Islamic opposition movement have to be discredited and crushed, but the haunting spectre of a violent and radical Islamism taking root off the coast of continental Europe had to emerge, to help garner international support for indefinite military rule.

The notorious DRS – the Algerian secret service – systematically infiltrated insurrectionary Islamic groups like the GIA and from 1992 onwards launched its own fake guerrilla groups, including death squads disguised as Islamists. Bizarrely enough, these terrorised some highly militarised regions reputedly sympathetic to the Islamic FIS party. In 1994, the DRS eventually managed to place Jamel Zitouni, one the Islamists it controlled, at the head of the GIA, consequently renamed the ‘Islamic Group of the Army’ on the Algerian streets. ‘It henceforth became impossible to distinguish the genuine Islamists from those controlled by the regime,’ says Salima Mellah, spokesperson for the NGO Algeria Watch. ‘Each time the generals came under pressure from the international community, the terror intensified’.

By January 1995, however, Algeria’s ‘dirty war’ began to falter. Despite all of the actions taken to discredit the FIS, most notably the murder of seven Italian sailors in July 1994 in Algiers, the Italian government hosted an historic meeting of almost every Algerian political party, including the FIS. The participants agreed to a common platform of demands, calling for a national enquiry into the violence in Algeria, the end of the army’s involvement in political affairs, the ‘effective liberation of the leaders of the FIS’ and all political detainees, and the return of constitutional rule and popular sovereignty.

In a flash, the generals’ grip on power suddenly became untenable. Yet, in their desperation to cling on, they hatched, with the help of the DRS, a plot that would prevent French politicians from withdrawing support from the military junta ever again. As Aggoun and Rivoire explain, French-based Algerian spies initially tasked with infiltrating and monitoring Islamist networks in the early 1990s were transformed into agent provocateurs. In spring 1995, Ali Touchent – an Algerian agent, began to gather and incite a network of disaffected young men from North African backgrounds to commit terrorist attacks in France. The DRS’s infiltrators, led by Jamel Zitouni, also pushed the GIA to directly eliminate some of the FIS’s high profile leaders living in Europe on the pretext that the FIS’s willingness to talk with the Algerian government made it anti-Islamic.

On 11 July 1995, cheikh Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a high-profile leader of the FIS living as a political refugee in France, was assassinated in his Paris mosque. The GIA claimed responsibility. Exactly two weeks later the bombing of the Paris Metro kllled eight people. After a further attack in the weeks that followed, Zitouni called on French President, Jacques Chirac, to ‘convert to Islam to be saved’. The resulting public hysteria against Islam and Islamism saw the French government abandon overnight its support for the Rome accord.

So what happened to the perpetrators? While several people, mainly French from North African backgrounds,,were found guilty of ‘association with terrorism’, the masterminds of the main attack were never caught. Strangely, despite being publicly identified by the Algerian authorities as the European ringleader of the GIA, named by French investigators as the key organiser and known by them since 1993, Ali Touchent miraculously managed to evade capture and returned to Algeria where he settled, very publicly, in a highly secure police quarter of Algiers.

France’s apparent inability to drag to justice those genuine responsible for the 1995 attacks is now known to be more than an accident. According to a book by Mohamed Samraoui, a former colonel in the Algerian secret service: ‘the French intelligence knew that Ali Touchent was a DRS operative charged with infiltrating pro-Islamist cells in foreign countries.’ In return for supplying the French with valuable information Ali Touchent was granted protection by the DST (French Intelligence), ‘which explains why Ali Touchent was never worried on French soil.’

This is not the only explanation for French collaboration with the Algerian government. Algeria is one of the main supplier of gas and oil to France, and an importer of its products. According to François Gèze of La Decouverte, one of the first French publishers to expose the involvement of the Algerian secret services in the ‘dirty war’, at the heart of this strong economic relationship is a tale of unimaginable political corruption implicating part of France’s political establishment. ‘French exporters generally pay a 10 to 15 percent commission on their goods,’ explains Gèze. ‘Part of this revenue is then “repaid” by the Algerians as finance for the electoral campaigns of French political parties. As John Sweeney from the Observer put it indelicately in 1997 quoting a political analyst: “Le pouvoir [Algerian military junta] has the French government… by the balls. They have made secret donations to French parties and politicians, so that they can blackmail them.”‘

What the true story of France’s 1995 brush with ‘Islamic terror’ reveals is that the attacks, while probably executed by a small number of Muslim extremists, were conceived and manipulated by vested interests involved in a power struggle that has led to the death of 200,000 people since 1992, and six times more civilian ‘disappearances’ than under the Pinochet regime. British policy makers would do well to understand the specific political context and complex colonial legacy of French-Algerian relations before they go looking for direct comparisons. The 1995 case is also a warning against blaming ‘Islamists’ for terror, whilst turning a blind eye to repressive actions of governments in the Arab world when they suit a western government’s agenda.

An edited version of this article was first published in The Guardian

The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) estimates that around 60 pupils have ‘been ejected from the state school system since the law came into effect on 15 March 2004′. Of these, 42 Muslim and six Sikh teenagers were expelled from their schools, 11 Muslim pupils were enrolled in schools abroad including Belgium, Turkey and Germany, and at least one Muslim pupil left school altogether.

While these provisional figures match those of the French government, they are lower than those collected by another organisation, the Committee of the 15 March and of Freedom, which estimates that almost 70 pupils, mainly Muslim, have either been expelled or have abandoned school altogether. Another 26 students were reported to have ‘voluntarily’ left their schools during the period of dialogue between headmasters and pupils, and 77 Muslim students enrolled in schools abroad. Finally, according to both government and the Committee’s statistics over 500 pupils, overwhelmingly Muslim, have been forced to remove their ‘headgear’ since September 2004.

The Alsace-Moselle region has seen the largest number of young Muslims excluded. Ironically, this is the only region where Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious teaching is allowed in State schools, as it belonged to Germany when the main laws on secularism were passed.

Perhaps the most shocking evidence of how the ban has been enforced, however, is that the majority of pupils have been expelled for simply wearing bandanas. This might, at first, seem a little strange – since a bandana can hardly be considered as ‘conspicuously marking religious affiliation’. It makes more sense, though, if you consider that the presumption of a pupil’s religion is often based upon their ethnicity so that the ban affects a specific kind of bandana wearer: those of African and Arabic descent.

Such a questionable racist measure would of course violate the principle of equality amongst users of public services, also enshrined in French law. But, according to Lila Charef, a former lawyer who accompanied many pupils during their disciplinary proceedings, this is exactly what has been happening in France under the new law. ‘Discriminatory controls based on ethnic background were made in many schools’, Lila commented. ‘A young French girl of North African descent who was called up in front of the disciplinary council rightly pointed out that another pupil who also wore a bandana had not had any disciplinary charges brought against her.’

The period of dialogue that is legally required before any disciplinary action is taken is also being used to degrade and humiliate pupils, in effect punishing them before they have even been judged. Those affected have typically found themselves isolated from the rest of their schoolmates, some moved for weeks from one empty classroom to another according to the needs of the school. In various schools, pupils have been deprived of recreation or access to dining halls to prevent them from having contact with their friends.

The State is still legally obliged to provide all pupils with continuous educational support until the exclusion measure has been put in place. However, the evidence shows that ‘educational support’ has usually meant photocopies of lessons, at best, rather than actual teaching, which has heightened the students’ sense of isolation and punishment.

‘What really struck me’, confided Lila Charef, ‘was the collective collusion against these children, who were forced to choose between their desire to study and succeed, as many of these pupils were brilliant students, and their religious convictions. I think this was the hardest thing for these girls.’